My Riot Pt. 1 Pub Quiz

'A Multitude is a plurality of conscious and sensitive beings sharing no common intentionality, and showing no common pattern of behaviour.  The crowd shuffling in the city moves in countless different directions with countless different motivations.' - the Uprising -  Franco Beradi

I think it was on 7^th or 8^th of August 2011 that I was taking part in a pub quiz in Clapham, at a pub called the Lamb, and I was a tad squiffy. We were doing quite well, definitely in the top 3, we would maybe have won a bottle of wine or at least some money behind the bar, which makes what happened next even more galling. At a certain point in the evening, just over half way, there was a sudden and unexpected lull in the atmosphere and everyone somehow spontaneously got up to leave.  My companions and I looked around with confusion and didn’t really know what was going on, that was until a mysterious stranger, with straggly hair and wild eyes, put his ruddy hands on our table leaned in and whispered: ‘the riots coming’, before disappearing in an instant.  That may not be 100% accurate but that’s how it appears in my memory.

We got up, rather lazily I thought, but then again it was a hot day, dare I say perfect weather for a riot, and went outside, we stood for a while waiting for this beast with many parts to come over the horizon, but when it didn’t we said goodbye and headed in our relevant directions. 

***

It’s been 1,029,600 minutes, or nearly 2 years, since the riots of 2011 in London and suddenly the writing comes, like a brick through a shop window (apologies, due to that plastic resin they use, it may take a few hefty projectiles). Living in London I had a somewhat split perception of the events, both immanent and mediated – both in the flesh and through the media. The following is my experience of the ‘event’.

Ultimately, it wasn’t so much of a riot rather than an unauthorised consumer binge; the donkey bucking off its rider and finally munching the carrot, with as much intelligence and self consciousness as an ass would have. Was it born from a revolutionary muster, the people lashing back at their oppressors and sending them a message? The dissatisfaction with mediocre government, greedy bankers and mechanistic corporations, all lacking in emotion and spirit, spilling over into action? The actuality is no, well kind of, but I so wanted it to be more. Maybe so did everyone else. It seems to me that the press and media did its job in terms of conjuring a condemnation and general fear of the ‘terrible things’ that were happening, killing all the complexity and nuance, sounding out Professor Pavlov’s bell. My experience was very different and somewhat unaccounted for.

Ok, so I have studied many a revolutionary book and film relating to the French Revolution and May 68, so I was expecting principles and some kind of artistic spontaneous expression relating to a future freedom. I realise this may be a tad romantic and idealistic, but good, because that’s where I live. There was definitely spontaneity, expression and anger but there was also passion, humour and camaraderie and when it all kicked off and kept growing there was that fear that anything could happen, what if this was actually it, the end we have been imagining and playing out for years?  Sadly the only organising principle of the rioters seemed to be transient personal gain and there is nothing rousing or revolutionary about that, in fact it is quite the opposite.

For me, as well as other Londoners out on the streets, it was a thrill, the crack in a normal white line on a white page of existence. Things were out of their place, people were taking things and destroying things that used to be behind shiny surfaces; the surfaces were shattered, the boredom was shattered; it was exciting, an event for everyone; something happening in our own back garden. It had an eerie effect, things were misplaced; the mannequins were on the wrong side of the window, among us.

The images and news articles from the media (the unshatterable shiny surface) seemed to be coming from a different dimension to my empirical reality. It was an uncanny place to be, between the ‘real’ of the streets and the symbolic of the representation, it was presented like any other news story as if it was happening 500 miles away in some other place. I presume this is so that we could reassure ourselves that we are safe and morally superior, and maybe providing this detachment is the collective function of the media. The images kept it at a distance, but I looked out my window and it was there – I was caught in the middle and it made me re-evaluate how I thought about those news stories that actually were in places 500 miles away, what was I not seeing?

My only reference point for a riot was what I had seen on the news; I wasn’t sure which way around to work things. It was all so familiar on the TV: there were on the spot reports, replays of particularly lurid violence, we heard nothing from the rioters (just as we never hear from the Taliban etc). There were journalists that did interview some of the rioters after the fact, who were hooded and full of bravado, but this wasn’t on their own terms and produced mainly the same old crap fitted into the same old box; they fulfilled the expectations of the roles they were given – or edited as such.

Maybe there wasn’t a reason for the ‘violence’; it will go down as the great Dada revolution, no principles, no rules just expression – and a new pair of trainers.

***

As I walked to Clapham Junction...

 TBC

Welcome

Welcome to the synthesis of intelligence and idiocy, a new world, and you are all invited. Let us create, play and slay the dragons of our inhibitions.

Idiot  -  An utterly foolish or senseless person.

         -  A person with a mental age of less than 3 years old and an IQ of less than 25.

Intellectual -  A person possessing intellect or greater mental capacity.

                  -  A person given to study, reflection and speculation.

Idiotllectual - Me, you, everybody.  

I want to exist where the two meet – I want to be every person I have ever been.

Here’s how I came to this realisation and it’s not pretty, an instance of stupidity beyond the call of duty. 

Upon trip to the Isle of Wight I purchased a bottle of cider, I think it was from a English Heritage country house or something, it was a ‘this is special lsle of Wight cider’ type of thing, so being a connoisseur of the various kinds of fermented apples, or pretending I was, I bought the cider.

3 or 4 days, maybe a week later, I think it was a sunny day and I fancied a cold alcoholic beverage, I retrieved my bottle from the fridge and examined it proudly, you knew it was good because it was wrapped in that silvery tin foil stuff around the top, proper posh like, excessive and shiny. 

I went straight for the corkscrew, I was gonna pop that mofo and slurp it down, I punctured the top with the metal screw and twisted it down hard and the two arms lifted in a satisfying hailing to the gods of cider. I pushed the arms down and...punck... the screw didn’t take, popping out and leaving a small hole in the cork. Fuck, stupid thing, again and again this went on for 15 – 20 minutes. At which point, in a defeated annoyance, I opted to go for a can from the fridge and that’s where the story ends... unless you consider the fact that a few days later I decided to have another go, with the same results until, in my annoyance, I peeled the foil around the top to discover the bottle actually had a screw top and was not corked at all.

Now, this does strike me as a being a tad stupid, is there a philosophy to incorporate this behaviour? Probably, but just in case there isn’t: Kapow, here’s one.

Stupidity is, in a way, much more interesting than intelligence, people seem to take their intelligence so seriously.  I wouldn’t have had such a story or realisation if I had simply pulled off the foil and opened the bottle. I mean, I do have a providence of intelligence too, I have an MA and managed to successfully negotiate the intricacies of running a company as well as being moderately well-read and knowledgeable on a range of subjects, but I don't really have any remarkable stories about those things. 

I don’t want to privilege stupidity – that would be stupid, but create a synthesis, a mutual conversation.

Here we are stuck in the middle, not between common sense and book-smart, but between knowing and innocence.

In short:  Eat cheese, get drunk, read Nietzsche, watch romantic comedies, write an opera, play the cello, chase dogs down alleys, paint classical portraits, eat something after its been on the floor, read poetry out loud, smile at strangers, spell fings wrong, correct peoples’ grammar, fall over in ridiculous ways, ballet dance, create, destroy, create again, weep, laugh, high five your own stupidity then shake hands with your wisdom; or vice versa.

The Idiotllectual deals with with news articles and current events. My views, as ridiculous as they sometimes are, never seem to be represented in the media and so here is an attempt at seeing if they are possible to explicate. I don't strive for any themes or cogent weltanschauung, just an instinctive engagement with the world.